My friend Sam and I went to Weldon,NC on Friday 4/23. Back during January, I practiced defensive calendaring 😉 and blocked a couple of Fridays in April. Well, the Chancellor wanted a meeting for a search committee on which I’m participating on one of those days, and when your boss’ boss calls, you attend the meeting! That left me with only this past Friday 4/23 open. Probably should have booked a May Friday with this year’s cold weather, but c’est la vie…

We got to Weldon about 9:30, and the parking lot was about as full of boats as it could be…I pulled the boat off the trailer while Sam parked my truck. The extra (third) lane on the ramp helps a lot with traffic! We ran down the river to Big Rock, and set up the the drifting flotilla of bait fishermen. Talked to a couple of fly guys who’d picked up a couple of fish, but it was slow for them. Water temp was about 63.5F. Drifted for a couple of hours, and couldn’t buy a strike. We were marking fish about about 6′-8′ deep, per the fish finder, but no luck for us. We were watching the bait guys catching fish slowly but steadily. Picked up and ran down to the power lines, but didn’t change our luck. Decided that we wanted to anchor and eat lunch, so we ran back up the river and anchored in front of Troublefield Gut. Had lunch and watched the parade of boats drifting by. We caught a couple of fish, including a largemouth, a crappie and a couple of stripers. We decided to head to to Big Rock (bigger than last week, as the river was down to about 8,000 cfs), but talked to a couple of fly guys who’d found a seam and caught about 20 about 1/2 way up Little River. They suggested we try that, and did, but wasn’t working for us. However, Sam had the “catch of the day” when he foul-hooked a turtle in the foot!

We tried all sorts of colors of flies, but chartreuse/white worked “better” (that’s a relative term!) than others and tried both sinktip and full sink lines. It was one of those days when the fishing was better than the catching. Headed home about 4PM. Maybe my fish mojo will be on next time, but still a great day to be out.